For a prototype it's OK

Actually it's a great idea. If the car crashes, you can just blame the driver for holding the ipad wrong.

Actually, the reason they have an ipad in the dashboard is almost certainly because a student thought it would be way cooler to have an ipad with an app relaying data over some connection than plugging a small screen into an embedded PC.

You'd think it would be obvious to some of the folks at slashdot that pontificating about a grand idea is much, much easier than making a simpler idea actually work right.

, but it was a clunky implementation.

Well, so's the webGL implementation.

I remember a story a while back about getting nearly 45 FPS on a shooter on a fast desktop (first gen Core i7) using WebGL.

Of course the shooter was Quake II.

Which was nicely playable (don't remember the exact FPS, though it didn't always maintain 45 in very large scenes) on my P133 with an Nvidia Riva128 graphics card.

No. You have to try harder than that.

You can pretend that everything is just published on the internet and printing is just something old people do all you like, it is simply not the case yet.

No, I actually stand by my claim.

Only the people at the high end of the print and design industry actually care about things like colour matching and quality.

There are huge swaths of businesses who print stuff who apparently just do not care one bit. Just look around at all the random signage and posters printed for anything that's not a huge advertising campaign and/or by a very large company. The sort of things produced by the large number of smaller regional and local businesses.

The quality is terrible. The typesetting is terrible. The design is terrible.

Just near where I work, there's a barber with a shop sign out the front in the street. It has a picture of a man getting a shave on it. I CAN SEE THE FUCKING PIXELS. I'm not joking, it's eyebleedingly bad. The pixels are huge, the colours are saturated and the kerning on the sign is bad.

Yet the shop seems to do good business.

There are whole bunch of professional people engaged in nothing bud business responsible for comissioning and producing that sign. Given that they didn't care enough to find a picture with adequate pixel density, I think it is fair to claim that they don't care about CMYK.

Almost all stuff is on the low end like that. That's why shops like VistaPrint are popular and very profitable. Most people, even people who need signs and things for professional purposes just do not care.

Yeah, there are some pro photographers and high end design companies, but most of the world is not like that. Most is cheap and cheerful, and most people wouldn't notice pixellation or bad colour matching even if a blue pixellated dog bit them on the leg.

So yeah, most people just don't care and the web has nothing to do with it.

Hopefully the Gimp folks can make some use of this.

Certainly, because GIMP won't be a success until it natively supports CMYK like photoshop.

[ for the impaired, GIMP does and this version of photoshop does not, and noone outside the print industry gives a damn ]

An existing example in another market is the Boeing/Airbus duopoly. In the current world market no one outside of Europe or the US has a lot of control over what kinds of long and intermediate passenger planes are built. (Short range passenger aircraft are a different story.) The Chinese are already working on joining this club, by the way.

It is incredibly difficult to enter this market: pretty much everything has been swallowed up and the two major powers are supported heavily by their respective governments. Not saying that China can't do it, but it's a very big uphill struggle since they don't have 60 years experience in building large long range jet aircraft. Even Anatov don't do much by the way of large passenger craft any more, although they are quite clearly capable of mass producing large airframes.

Of course modern airframes are apparently beyond the capability of one company to produce now (never mind the ancilliary parts), so there may be a way in, but it won't be easy, especially as they'll have to go through all the "oh crap my aircraft just fell apart mid air for no apparent reason" moments because they don't have the institutional knowledge yet.

Manufacturing is shifting: consumer stuff has long gone. The high tech, high margin stuff, like precision tools, airframes etc hasn't shifted. The main reason for shifting is due to the cost of labour. If that's not a significant factor, there's not much reason for it to shift. That doesn't preclude a country developing it's own competing industry though.

Oh come on, it's not just cat videos, people need to be able to share smug self-superior posts on slashdot, too.

Civillian aircraft have all sorts of radar: airliners can detect other aircraft. I believe there was an incident where an airliner's collision detection radar atually detected an F117 and had to temporarily abort a climb, due to a near miss.

But yes, most civillian aircraft are small don't have any radar whatsoever.

So how does one buy a large enough monitor that is incapable of receiving broadcasts? Perhaps the UK market is different, but all the living-room-size monitors I see in the USA are capable of receiving broadcasts.

Actually, I glossed over. You merely have to not use it for receiving broadcasts. It's prefectly legal to own an unused receiver without a license. Capita (the licesing people) don't like to tell you this since they rely on the license for their money---the BBC gets a fixed free and Capita keep the difference.

Also, they've never prosecuted a single person who hasn't let them in and owned up.

Openoffice is just too slow, on my Linux box I use google sheets and gnumeric.

Speaking as someone with a slow computer (eee 900), what computer are you running???

I've tried FF and Chromium and there is no way that those hogs + a huge ajaxy web 3.2.4-beta page is faster than LO.

But yeah, I usually use gnumeric even on bigger machines because it's fast.

But LO is acceptable on an eee 900. Not super snappy but not terrible either.

And while the free Office products are sufficient for most people's normal use (i.e. homework),

That's a subtle troll. Well done.

I love how you dismiss everyone who doesn't need vastly complex features (LO has some pretty involved ones) and their work by comparing it to nothing more than schoolwork.

If you need more complex features on a semi-regular basis, it's worth paying the price (but if all you do is type in text and change the font, stick with free).

I'll clue you in on something from the world of "real work"(tm) where people do "real things" for "money" which makes it much more important than "schoolwork": almost noone knows how to use word beyond changing fonts and typing text.

Actually this is one of the things that aggravates me about people who refuse to conemplate the idea of moving to another system because "they know word": almost always they don't even know how to use it beyond the absolute basics.

I understand that DRM has legitimate purposes,

No it doesn't.

What it does is annoy the paying customer and serve as no impediment to the pirate.

I would disagree. In fact if I was legally allowed the option. I would cancel my TV license and subscribe to netflix which is less than half the price :)

So do it then, that's perfectly legal. I own no TV (i.e. broadcast receiver), but watch plenty of non live stuff online and DVDs. It's 100% legal too.

If every licence-payer paid an extra £7 we wouldn't need to protect that content.

selling DVD and audio recordings

They already have no need to protect it. Audio is now DRM free by default and the DRM on DVDs is so bad that it may as well not exist: there are hundreds of free and commercial programs for ripping DVDs and it's easy to buy unrestricted players off the shelf.

Furthermore all the video and audio recordings worth anything at all are already on TPB, yet they still sell them.

So, if every license payer paid an extra £0, we wouldn't need to protect the content.